The problem of the SA was inextricably bound up with the other threat to the consolidation of Hitler’s power. Reich President Hindenburg was old and frail. The issue of the succession would loom within the foreseeable future. Hindenburg, the symbol of ‘old’ Germany, and ‘old’ Prussia, was the figurehead behind which stood still powerful forces with somewhat ambivalent loyalties towards the new state. Most important among them was the army, of which as Head of State Hindenburg was supreme commander. The Reichswehr leadership was intensely and increasingly alarmed by the military pretensions of the SA. Failure on Hitler’s part to solve the problem of the SA could conceivably lead to army leaders favouring an alternative as Head of State on Hindenburg’s death – perhaps resulting in a restoration of the monarchy, and a de facto military dictatorship. Such a development would have met with favour among sections, not just of the military old guard, but of some national-conservative groups, which had favoured an authoritarian, anti-democratic form of state but had become appalled by the Hitler regime. The office of the Vice-Chancellor, Papen, gradually emerged as the focal point of hopes of blunting the edge of the Nazi revolution. Since Papen continued to enjoy the favour of the Reich President, such ‘reactionaries’, though small in number, could not be discounted in power-political terms. And since at the same time there were growing worries among business leaders about serious and mounting economic problems, the threat to the consolidation of Hitler’s power – and with that of the regime itself – was a real one.
Ernst Röhm’s SA had been the spearhead of the Nazi revolution in the first months of 1933. The explosion of elemental violence had needed no commands from above. The SA had long been kept on a leash, told to wait for the day of reckoning. Now it could scarcely be contained. Orgies of hate-filled revenge against political enemies and horrifically brutal assaults on Jews were daily occurrences. A large proportion of the estimated 100,000 persons taken into custody in these turbulent months were held in makeshift SA prisons and camps. Some hundred of these were set up in the Berlin area alone. Many victims were bestially tortured. The minimal figure of some 500–600 murdered in what the Nazis themselves proclaimed as a bloodless and legal revolution can largely be placed on the account of the SA. The first Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, described after the war the conditions in one of the SA’s Berlin prisons: ‘The “interrogations” had begun and ended with a beating. A dozen fellows had laid into their victims at intervals of some hours with iron bars, rubber coshes, and whips. Smashed teeth and broken bones bore witness to the tortures. As we entered, these living skeletons with festering wounds lay in rows on the rotting straw …’
As long as the terror was levelled in the main at Communists, Socialists, and Jews, it was in any case not likely to be widely unpopular, and could be played down as ‘excesses’ of the ‘national uprising’. But already by the summer, the number of incidents mounted in which overbearing and loutish behaviour by SA men caused widespread public offence even in pro-Nazi circles. By this time, complaints were pouring in from industry, commerce, and local government offices about disturbances and intolerable actions by stormtroopers. The Foreign Office added its own protest at incidents where foreign diplomats had been insulted or even manhandled. The SA was threatening to become completely uncontrollable. Steps had to be taken. Reich President Hindenburg himself requested Hitler to restore order.
The need for Hitler to act became especially urgent after Röhm had openly stated the SA’s aim of continuing the ‘German Revolution’ in the teeth of attempts by conservatives, reactionaries, and opportunist fellow-travellers to undermine and tame it. Röhm was clearly signalling to the new rulers of Germany that for him the revolution was only just starting; and that he would demand a leading role for himself and the mighty organization he headed – by now some 4½ million strong.
Forced now for the first time to choose between the demands of the party’s paramilitary wing and the ‘big battalions’ pressing for order, Hitler summoned the Reich Governors to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery on 6 July. ‘The revolution is not a permanent condition,’ he announced; ‘it must not turn into a lasting situation. It is necessary to divert the the river of revolution that has broken free into the secure bed of evolution.’ Other Nazi leaders – Frick, Göring, Goebbels, and Heß – took up the message in the weeks that followed. There was an unmistakable change of course.
Röhm’s ambitions were, however, undaunted. They amounted to little less than the creation of an ‘SA state’, with extensive powers in the police, in military matters, and in the civil administration. It was not just a matter of Röhm’s own power ambitions. Within the gigantic army of Brownshirts, expectations of the wondrous shangri-la to follow the day when National Socialism took power had been hugely disappointed. Though they had poured out their bile on their political enemies, the offices, financial rewards, and power they had naïvely believed would flow their way remained elusive. Talk of a ‘second revolution’, however little it was grounded in any clear programme of social change, was, therefore, bound to find strong resonance among rank-and-file stormtroopers.
Ernst Röhm had, then, no difficulty in expanding his popularity among SA men through his continued dark threats in early 1934 about further revolution which would accomplish what the ‘national uprising’ had failed to bring about. He remained publicly loyal to Hitler. Privately, he was highly critical of Hitler’s policy towards the Reichswehr and his dependency on Blomberg and Reichenau. And he did nothing to deter the growth of a personality cult elevating his leadership of the SA. At the Reich Party Rally of Victory in 1933, he had been the most prominent party leader after Hitler, clearly featuring as the Führer’s right-hand man. By early 1934, Hitler had been largely forced from the pages of the SA’s newspaper, SA-Mann, by the expanding Röhm-cult.
At least in public, the loyalty was reciprocated. Hitler wavered, as he would continue to do during the first months of 1934, between Röhm’s SA and the Reichswehr. He could not bring himself to discipline, let alone dismiss, Röhm. The political damage and loss of face and popularity involved made such a move risky. But the realities of power compelled him to side with the Reichswehr leadership. This became fully clear only at the end of February.
By 2 February 1934, at a meeting of his Gauleiter, Hitler was again criticizing the SA in all but name. Only ‘idiots’ thought the revolution was not over; there were those in the Movement who only understood ‘revolution’ as meaning ‘a permanent condition of chaos’.
The previous day, Röhm had sent Blomberg a memorandum on relations between the army and SA. What he appeared to be demanding – no copy of the actual memorandum has survived – was no less than the concession of national defence as the domain of the SA, and a reduction of the function of the armed forces to the provision of trained men for the SA. So crass were the demands that it seems highly likely that Blomberg deliberately falsified or misconstrued them when addressing a meeting of army District Commanders on 2 February in Berlin. They were predictably horrified. Now Hitler had to decide, stated Blomberg. The army lobbied him. In a conscious attempt to win his support against the SA, Blomberg, without any pressure from the Nazi leadership, introduced the NSDAP’s emblem into the army and accepted the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ for the officer corps, leading to the prompt dismissal of some seventy members of the armed forces. Röhm, too, sought to win his support. But, faced with having to choose between the Reichswehr, with Hindenburg’s backing, or his party army, Hitler could now only decide one way.
By 27 February the army leaders had worked out their ‘guidelines for cooperation with the SA’, which formed the basis for Hitler’s speech the next day and had, therefore, certainly been agreed with him. At the meeting in the Reichswehr Ministry on 28 February, attended by Reichswehr, SA, and SS leaders, Hitler rejected outright Röhm’s plans for an SA-militia. The SA was to confine its activities to political, not military, matters. A militia, such as Röhm was suggesting, was not suitable even for minimal national defence
. He was determined to build up a well-trained ‘people’s army’ in the Reichswehr, equipped with the most modern weapons, which must be prepared for all eventualities on defence within five years and suitable for attack after eight years. He demanded of the SA that they obey his orders. For the transitional period before the planned Wehrmacht was set up, he approved Blomberg’s suggestion to deploy the SA for tasks of border protection and pre-military training. But ‘the Wehrmacht must be the sole bearer of weapons of the nation’.
Röhm and Blomberg had to sign and shake hands on the ‘agreement’. Hitler departed. Champagne followed. But the atmosphere was anything but cordial. When the officers had left, Röhm was overheard to remark: ‘What the ridiculous corporal declared doesn’t apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and has at least to be sent on leave. If not with, then we’ll manage the thing without Hitler.’ The person taking note of these treasonable remarks was SA-Obergruppenfuhrer Viktor Lutze, who reported what had gone on to Hitler. ‘We’ll have to let the thing ripen’ was all he gleaned as reply. But the show of loyalty was noted. When he needed a new SA chief after the events of 30 June, Lutze was Hitler’s man.
II
From the beginning of 1934, Hitler seems to have recognized that he would be faced with no choice but to cut Röhm down to size. How to tackle him was, however, unclear. Hitler deferred the problem. He simply awaited developments. The Reichswehr leadership, too, was biding its time, expecting a gradual escalation, but looking then to a final showdown. Relations between the army and the SA continued to fester. But Hitler did, it seems, order the monitoring of SA activities. According to the later account of Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels, it was in January 1934 that Hitler requested him and Göring to collect material on the excesses of the SA. From the end of February onwards, the Reichswehr leadership started assembling its own intelligence on SA activities, which was passed to Hitler. Once Himmler and Heydrich had taken over the Prussian Gestapo in April, the build-up of a dossier on the SA was evidently intensified. Röhm’s foreign contacts were noted, as well as those with figures at home known to be cool towards the regime, such as former Chancellor Schleicher.
By this time, Röhm had incited an ensemble of powerful enemies, who would eventually coagulate into an unholy alliance against the SA. Göring was so keen to be rid of the SA’s alternative power-base in Prussia – which he himself had done much to establish, starting when he made the SA auxiliary police in February 1933 – that he was even prepared by 20 April to concede control over the Prussian Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler, thus paving the way for the creation of a centralized police-state in the hands of the SS. Himmler himself, and even more so his cold and dangerous henchman Reinhard Heydrich, recognized that their ambitions to construct such an empire – the key edifice of power and control in the Third Reich – rested on the élite SS breaking with its superior body, the SA, and eliminating the power-base held by Röhm. In the party, the head of the organization, installed in April 1933 with the grand title of Deputy Führer, Rudolf Heß, and the increasingly powerful figure behind the scenes Martin Bormann, were more than aware of the contempt in which the Political Organization was held by Röhm’s men and the threat of the SA actually replacing the party, or making it redundant. For the army, as already noted, Rohm’s aim to subordinate the Reichswehr to the interests of a people’s militia was anathema. Intensified military exercises, expansive parades, and, not least, reports of extensive weapon collections in the hands of the SA, did little to calm the nerves.
At the centre of this web of countervailing interests and intrigue, united only in the anxiety to be rid of the menace of the SA, Hitler’s sharp instinct for the realities of power by now must have made it plain that he had to break with Röhm.
In April it became known that Hindenburg was seriously ill. Hitler and Blomberg had already been told that the end was not far off. At the beginning of June, the Reich President retired to his estate at Neudeck in East Prussia. The most important prop of the conservatives was now far from the centre of the action. And the succession issue was imminent. Moreover, to remove the obstacle which the SA was providing to recommencing talks about rearmament with the western powers, Hitler had, at the end of May, ordered the SA to stop military exercises, and, in the last talks he had with Röhm, a few days later, had sent the stormtroopers on leave for a month.
This defusing of the situation, together with Hindenburg’s absence, made the situation more difficult, rather than easier, for the conservatives. But Papen used a speech on 17 June at the University of Marburg to deliver a passionate warning against the dangers of a ‘second revolution’ and a heated broadside against the ‘selfishness, lack of character, insincerity, lack of chivalry, and arrogance’ featuring under the guise of the German revolution. He even criticized the creation of a ‘false personality cult’. ‘Great men are not made by propaganda, but grow out of their actions,’ he declared. ‘No nation can live in a continuous state of revolution,’ he went on. ‘Permanent dynamism permits no solid foundations to be laid. Germany cannot live in a continuous state of unrest, to which no one sees an end.’ The speech met with roars of applause within the hall. Outside, Goebbels moved swiftly to have it banned, though not before copies of the speech had been run off and circulated, both within Germany and to the foreign press. Word of it quickly went round. Never again in the Third Reich was such striking criticism at the heart of the regime to come from such a prominent figure. But if Papen and his friends were hoping to prompt action by the army, supported by the President, to ‘tame’ Hitler, they were disappointed. As it was, the Marburg speech served as the decisive trigger to the brutal action taken at the end of the month.
Hitler’s own mood towards the ‘reactionaries’ was darkening visibly. Without specifying any names, his speech at Gera at the Party Rally of the Thuringian Gau on 17 June, the same day as Papen’s speech, gave a plain indication of his fury at the activities of the Papen circle. He castigated them as ‘dwarves’, alluding, it seems, to Papen himself as a ‘tiny worm’. Then came the threat: ‘If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.’ Such a mood prefigured the murder of some prominent members of the conservative ‘reaction’ on 30 June. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the Papen speech, a strike against the ‘reactionaries’ seemed more likely than a showdown with the SA.
At the imposition of the ban on publishing his speech, Papen went to see Hitler. He said Goebbels’s action left him no alternative but to resign. He intended to inform the Reich President of this unless the ban were lifted and Hitler declared himself ready to follow the policies outlined in the speech. Hitler reacted cleverly – in wholly different manner from his tirades in the presence of his party members. He acknowledged that Goebbels was in the wrong in his action, and that he would order the ban to be lifted. He also attacked the insubordination of the SA and stated that they would have to be dealt with. He asked Papen, however, to delay his resignation until he could accompany him to visit the President for a joint interview to discuss the entire situation. Papen conceded – and the moment was lost.
Hitler wasted no time. He arranged an audience alone with Hindenburg on 21 June. On the way up the steps to Hindenburg’s residence, Schloß Neudeck, he was met by Blomberg, who had been summoned by the President in the furore following Papen’s speech. Blomberg told him bluntly that it was urgently necessary to take measures to ensure internal peace in Germany. If the Reich Government was incapable of relieving the current state of tension, the President would declare martial law and hand over control to the army. Hitler realized that there could be no further prevarication. He had to act. There was no alternative but to placate the army – behind which stood the President. And that me
ant destroying the power of the SA without delay.
What Hitler had in mind at this stage is unclear. He seems to have spoken about deposing Röhm, or having him arrested. By now, however, Heydrich’s SD – the part of the labyrinthine SS organization responsible for internal surveillance – and the Gestapo were working overtime to concoct alarmist reports of an imminent SA putsch. SS and SD leaders were summoned to Berlin around 25 June to be instructed by Himmler and Heydrich about the measures to be taken in the event of an SA revolt, expected any time. For all their unruliness, the SA had never contemplated such a move. The leadership remained loyal to Hitler. But now, the readiness to believe that Röhm was planning a takeover was readily embraced by all the SA’s powerful enemies. The Reichswehr, during May and June becoming increasingly suspicious about the ambitions of the SA leadership, made weapons and transport available to the SS (whose small size and – at this time – confinement to largely policing work posed no threat to the military). An SA putsch was now thought likely in summer or autumn. The entire Reichswehr leadership were prepared for imminent action against Röhm. The psychological state for a strike against the SA was rapidly forming. Alarm bells were set ringing loudly on 26 June through what seemed to be an order by Röhm for arming the SA in preparation for an attack on the Reichswehr. The ‘order’, in fact a near-certain fake (though by whom was never established), had mysteriously found its way into the office of the Abwehr chief, Captain Conrad Patzig. Lutze was present when Blomberg and Reichenau presented Hitler the following day with the ‘evidence’. Hitler had already hinted to Blomberg two days earlier that he would summon SA leaders to a conference at Bad Wiessee on the Tegernsee, some fifty miles south-east of Munich, where Röhm was residing, and have them arrested. This decision seems to have been confirmed at the meeting with Blomberg and Reichenau on 27 June. The same day, SS-Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, commander of Hitler’s houseguards, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, arranged with the Reichswehr to pick up the arms needed for a ‘secret and very important commission of the Führer’.